The world is moving towards mobile apps from ordering food online to booking flight tickets. All of this is happening with just one click on our mobile phones, ever wondered how these apps are so efficient and effective in working on all sizes of devices, on different operating systems and frameworks. For any app to stand out of herds, it must be high-quality, and that requires thorough design and testing.
My aim with this blog is to provide some practical knowledge to beginners so that they will not get lost in the world of mobile testing.

What is the first thing that hits your mind when you hear mobile testing? Devices, N number of devices right?

So let’s start with the most important factor. How to choose the right device?

1. Research the most widely held and used mobile types from your target customer group.

2. Mobiles with different screen resolutions and OS, memory size, connectivity

3. Emulators and Simulators can provide you extra help to test on multiple devices with the less financial burden.

4. Using cloud device farms to have wide access to devices. 

Types of mobile applications you are testing.

There are various types of mobile applications available in the market some of them are mentioned below:

1. Mobile web application:

Mobile Web applications refer to applications that are available for mobile devices that require only a Web browser and do not require any package installer, it will deliver programs stored on the web through a browser interface.
One of the most important things to remember while testing mobile web applications is to cope with numerous types of browsers (natively constructed for the mobiles or popular browsers), performance/load testing, to overcome this challenge you can use various tools available such as Lambdatest, selenium, etc or you can select top 10 browsers available in the market and perform cross-browser testing on those browsers.

2. Native Mobile Application:

Unlike Mobile web apps, there are apps that will be directly installed on devices and provide various services to users. The major challenge in testing native mobile apps is to know your end-user, to overcome this challenge you need to collect as much data as possible from the end-user and ask these questions before heading ahead for testing.
1)Which devices do customers use the most?.

2)What is the basic need of the customer?

3)Ask for a few examples of real situations that they can face.

These questions will help you to plan your test strategy.

3. Hybrid Mobile Applications:

In simple terms, hybrid mobile applications are Mobile web applications wrapped inside native mobile applications.
The most important thing in testing hybrid mobile applications is to differentiate native and web objects to test each category properly. So you have to test both native and web objects properly on different supported devices and on cross platforms.

Various usage of Emulators and Simulators

1. Functionality Testing

With the help of emulators, the functionality of mobile applications can be checked on different OS versions with the help of fewer resources.

The mistake that most of the testers make in functionality testing is insufficient requirement gathering to overcome this challenge and to simulate customer requirements we can use emulators and simulators.

2. Usability testing

Usability testing can be done on multiple devices and tracking them will be easy when done on emulators.
The most important challenge in usability testing is what to test in a usability test?

1. Decide on the test goals what the user is looking for, their business goals, the basic requirements they are looking for, etc.
2. Make the tasks as realistic as possible, understanding that you are not in an actual use situation but you are simulating that situation.
3. Be flexible. Get as much user feedback as possible that will help you to open your mind and will help you to develop some out-of-the-box scenarios.

3. Data Usage

Data usage tracking can be a challenging task for MDM users. By using emulators and simulators, users can overcome the challenges easily and affordably.

Hope I was able to clear your doubts and this brief inside-out information about mobile testing helped you.